Fans pick 100 books like The Three-Arched Bridge

Every biographer must do battle with Robert Caro’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, a monumental account of urban planner Robert Moses, whose God-like power redesigning postwar New York City effectively remade the capital of the twentieth century. Over the course of 1,336 pages, Caro details Moses’s world-making vision while also acknowledging problematic issues, such as Moses’s reported use of racial slurs and his remapping of roads and overpasses to exclude poorer communities.

Today, half a century since its first publication, The Power Broker remains one of the greatest English-language biographies. It's also a landmark in showing how world-historical change can begin with aesthetic power. Like all foundational texts, its comprehensive documenting of both the ambitions and the prejudices of that era also lays a path for future insight. In gesturing toward Moses’s faults, this magisterial work also leaves room for subsequent generations to re-examine the problems of the past. 

Golding was living in Salisbury when he wrote The Lord of the Flies, and his day job as a teacher at a local boys' school left a clear imprint on his dystopic view of young men left to their own hierarchical devices. But the classroom also provided a very literal view of the inspiration for The Spire, a dense and disturbing parable in which rationality and physics crumble under evangelical mania and corporal lust. It is the story of Jocelin, Dean of a medieval cathedral, who, obsessed with a divine “vision in stone,” insists that the spire be raised to impossible heights. There is no happy ending in this cautionary tale of construction hubris, yet I return to it regularly in search of solace.

Like Golding, Garner is best known for his children’s books – tales that spring from the ancient mythology of his local Cheshire and wander into realms of high fantasy. But it is this slim novella, a collection of four stories binding as many generations of Garners (they have inhabited the region for centuries and they were, all of them - up until Alan, craftsmen, builders, laborers) that moves me to raptures. Beginning with a wide-eyed child’s discovery of cave drawings, the stories haul stone up above ground to lay out the longwalls of Garner’s mason progenitors and erect the spire of the local church, worn by Garner’s grandfather "like a dunce-cap.” The imagery and wordplay are stunning, binding dialect and landscape like a spell.

Among Robert Moses’ many divisive projects, the Verazzano-Narrows Bridge hits three Power Broker criteria: superlative (longest suspension bridge in the world); tyrannical (an entire neighborhood evicted from their homes); and indelible (who can imagine New York without its soaring Brooklyn-Staten Island link?). A sidebar to Moses’ expansion from Triborough to all-borough authority is the role of a bridge in birthing a fresh literary genre. A mid-century stylist of creative nonfiction, Talese wanted to celebrate the men who risked life and limb to span the narrows. His brand of detached observation has aged awkwardly (the stance on women, for example, or on Indian ironworkers “incapable of enforcing discipline, only capable of handing dollar bills around”). But it is a canonical work of New Journalism, written one year before the legendary essay, “Frank Sinatra has a cold.”

This book was written by one of the most interesting figures in the history of communist Yugoslavia, Milovan Đilas. He had been a high-level official and a close collaborator of Josip Broz Tito, the leader of Yugoslav partisans (who would become marshal and president of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia), before he became best known Yugoslav dissident. 

In this book Đilas gives a first-hand testimony of his meetings with Joseph Stalin, as a member of Yugoslav delegations sent to Moscow. Beautifully written, the book provides a rich insight into the political situation in the Balkans and in Stalin’s Soviet Union during some of the most turbulent times of modern European history. In a unique way, Đilas manages to combine personal accounts with critical perspectives on ideologies and political events that were in many ways decisive for Yugoslavia in the period to come.

The book challenges the well-established and dominant narratives about the break-up of Yugoslavia and the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s that have been promoted both in the mainstream media and in academic publications over the past decades. Written by a pre-eminent contemporary American political philosopher, Michael Parenti, the book in many ways compliments Noam Chomsky’s perspectives on the region and the broader imperial policies toward it.  

This is an extraordinary book that gives a broad understanding of the Balkan region in its cultural and historical contexts. The book explores the concept of the Balkans and its changing meaning which far surpasses its geographical connotations, becoming some kind of a concept-container capable of containing all sorts of fantasies and political aspirations. The book does an excellent job of depicting how various imperialisms managed to determine, to a very significant extent, the fate of peoples in the Balkans, while creating a certain image of the region whose significance extends far beyond its physical boundaries.

This book is rich in detail and tells the story of Maddie who is a travel writer who meets her future husband, Ian, while abroad. From the beginning during a 911 call, it’s obvious that something has gone badly wrong. This is a wonderfully written book, set in the Balkans, Iraq, and Kansas, to name a few places, and is full of tension. I cannot recommend this book highly enough. 

Well, there’s an obvious reason, I was born in Travnik, a small town in the very heart of Bosnia and Hercegovina. Despite being a small place, it is immensely important—especially if you ask people who were born and raised there ☺  

This book is a novel by one of the greatest European writers of the mid-twentieth century, Ivo Andrić, and it is one (of two) of his best novels. Apart from being written in a beautiful and unique (“Andrić’s”) style, it is also one of the best resources for understanding the cultural, social, and religious dynamic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, not only during the Ottoman times. If one wishes to get an insight into the culture and “mentality” of the people who traditionally inhabited the region, Chronicles of Travnik (often, curiously enough, translated into English as Bosnian Chronicle) can serve better than most sociological studies. It’s better, of course,… show more.

I am a fan of crime noir, and this story is one of the formats that I really appreciate–an investigation by a non-professional. Someone who can do the research and ask the questions behind the scenes without being noticed. He works within the shadows of law enforcement, getting information from both sides of the law. His curiosity leads him to intrigue.

I appreciated the man’s conflict within himself as he got closer to the danger and the temptations presented to him. All while he continues to work underneath the surface to solve a mystery he eventually becomes obsessed with himself.